Is it OK to increase validation checks and decrease min gradient while training neural network?

Administrative Behavior

• Please read the following article, and I would like your feedback on these 3 question at the end of the artical, i am asking for a way to replay to the questions: NATIONAL REPORTING previous | index | next The Price of Power -- No, Sir! The Military Wages Uphill Battle to Find The Willing and Able --- Quota-Haunted Sgt. Cady Anxiously Pursues Leads From a Shrinking Supply --- `Stay Away From Explosives' By Greg Jaffe 09/23/1999 The Wall Street Journal Page A1 (Copyright (c) 1999, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.) [Second in a series on military spending] SEATTLE -- After an excruciating slump, Daniel Cady is finally on the rebound. A recruiter for the Air Force, Staff Sgt. Cady already has signed up two of the four people he needs to meet his monthly quota. Looking crisp in his sky-blue uniform on a clear summer morning, he is game for a few hours of cold calls. Then Kalif Harper calls him. Sgt. Cady had cajoled Mr. Harper for two years before signing him up in June. Now it's mid-July, and he's just weeks away from shipping off to boot camp. "My mom offered me $500 if I try another year of community college," the 19-year-old says. "She what?" Sgt. Cady sputters. "Get down here. We need to talk." Sgt. Cady is on the front line of one of the most intractable problems facing the U.S. military today. Only a few years ago, the Pentagon was slimming down and had so many willing recruits that it raised its qualification standards. Now volunteers are in such short supply that the long-term viability of the United States' vaunted all-volunteer force is in question. Recruiters are working harder than ever, often putting in 65-hour weeks. But they are chasing an ever-shrinking pool of high-school students willing even to consider a military career. The reasons are many: The economy is surging, so more attractive options abound. States have spent billions building up vast community-college systems, giving millions more high-school graduates access to post-secondary education. Many of today's parents never served or were alienated by the Vietnam War; thus their children have little or no emotional connection to the military. And as the Cold War and the Gulf War have given way to peacekeeping missions of uncertain duration in unattractive locales, a career in uniform has become a much harder sell. For the first time since 1979, both the Air Force and the Army can't find enough people to fill the ranks. The Navy came up 7,000 recruits short of its target last year of about 55,000, so it decided to accept a larger number of recruits who didn't graduate from high school to meet this year's goals. Only the Marines, the smallest of the forces, is meeting its relatively modest goals without much trouble. Overall, the Department of Defense is 7% behind its recruitment goals this fiscal year -- the largest shortfall in years -- leaving it more than 9,000 recruits short and struggling to fulfill its missions with fewer and in some cases less-qualified troops. There's very little support in Congress or the Pentagon or among the public for one obvious solution: re-instituting the draft for the first time since 1974. Enticements such as lucrative signing bonuses, pay increases and tuition benefits have proved not to be panaceas. Expensive advertising campaigns, including new Navy spots produced by Spike Lee, have so far had little impact. All told, the Defense Department now spends nearly $2 billion a year recruiting about 200,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen. The military spent 11% less in 1989, adjusted for inflation, while signing up 40% more enlistees. A TASTE OF SUCCESS Before signing up with the Air Force himself in 1991, Sgt. Cady spent several years drifting. He graduated from high school in Detroit and worked for a local beer distributor until he was laid off. He tried a brief stint as a car salesman, but really wanted to work with computers. Unable to land a job in the field, he finally tasted success in the Air Force. He finished at the top of his boot-camp class, learned to repair mainframe computers and made staff sergeant in 3 1/2 years, about half the time it takes a typical airman. Performance reviews described him as "ingenious," "outstanding," and among the "top 1% of all airmen." Sgt. Cady says he grew bored repairing computers, and in 1996, he became a recruiter -- a job that he says seemed more exciting and challenging. Now, in July 1999, Sgt. Cady, 34 years old, makes about $40,000 a year in salary and benefits. He lives in an Air Force-subsidized apartment, with a swimming pool, tennis courts and a gymnasium, in Seattle's northern suburbs. "I really believe in the product I am selling," he says. The past three years, however, have tested his resolve. Three recruiters in Sgt. Cady's six-recruiter group were relieved of recruiting duty because of stress. In January, after a stretch of 70-hour weeks, Sgt. Cady was so mentally exhausted that he couldn't sleep for three days. He sought out an Air Force doctor for professional help, and was advised to take stress-management classes. The classes helped, but the pressure hasn't abated. Coming into the summer, he hadn't met his quota for three months, prompting his bosses to undertake an official "performance audit." Now he's fretting that he will never be promoted again. It's a cool, rainy Tuesday, a few days after the call from Mr. Harper. Sgt. Cady pulls his new red Jeep Grand Cherokee into a parking space in front of his office's big plate-glass window and walks into one of his biggest impediments: the Air Force recruiting office itself. It's located in the back corner of a bedraggled strip mall that includes a Korean video store, the Seoul High Fashion Boutique and the Ye-Dang discount furniture outlet. "You need an office that draws kids in and makes them feel good about the Air Force," Sgt. Cady complains. "If I was starting a business and this was the only site, I wouldn't even bother." He tries to make the best of it. Sgt. Cady goes out of his way to let potential recruits know that the spotless Cherokee parked outside is his. In the bathroom, the broad-shouldered six-footer fluffs his reddish-brown flattop and snips loose threads from his uniform with a nail clipper. He doesn't want recruits to picture themselves in a dingy office. He wants them to picture themselves in the $28,000 car sporting a snappy Air Force uniform. As usual, the out-of-the-way office generates no walk-in traffic, so Sgt. Cady hits the phones. To locate potential recruits, he makes calls from lists of thousands of high-school seniors, provided by the school system. In desperation, his call volume has soared; he made 931 calls the previous month, nearly three times last year's rate. A PREFERENCE FOR COLLEGE Like all recruiters, Sgt. Cady targets a dwindling pool of students who don't want to go to college immediately. Today, about 80% of high-school seniors plan to attend a four-year college, up from 50% in 1976, according to the University of Michigan's annual Monitoring the Future Study. Even the Pentagon's generous tuition plan -- up to $50,000 once recruits finish their initial four-year commitment -- has little impact. Three-quarters of all high-school seniors today say they have no interest in joining the military at all, up from about 55% in 1976. "Today's high-school seniors . . . don't see the military as a way to attend college," says David R. Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland in College Park. "They see it as a detour from college." Facing that reality, the Pentagon this year started targeting college campuses more aggressively, tapping recruiters who themselves had attended post-secondary schools and may be more adept at enticing students struggling with grades or finances. The Army also is considering allowing recruits to attend college on the government's dime before fulfilling their military commitment. For now, however, most recruitment efforts are aimed at students who aren't immediately college-bound. The problem is that few of them can meet the military's standards. Sgt. Cady has essentially given up on recruiting students from Seattle's inner-city schools, figuring few students there can pass the Defense Department's qualifying test, which measures basic middle- and high-school skills. At one urban school, Franklin High, only two of 12 students who took the test last year passed it. On a lark recently, Sgt. Cady randomly picked answers for each of the test's 99 multiple-choice questions. He got 20 right. Paging through his Franklin High folder, he laments, "Look at these scores -- 7, 11, 13." So Sgt. Cady concentrates his efforts on students from middle-income families. Not surprisingly, most he contacts already are enrolled in college. In four hours of cold calls, he finds only a handful expressing any interest: a 19-year-old who admitted to regularly using hallucinogenic mushrooms, an 18-year-old once convicted of burglary and a recent graduate who was arrested for blowing up a billboard with dynamite. All are disqualified. "If you know anyone interested in the Air Force, send them my way," Sgt. Cady tells that last young man. "And please, try to stay away from explosives." TELEPHONE OVERKILL Though most recruiting leads emerge from such telephone calls, the Pentagon has been slow to adopt modern telemarketing techniques. With relatively high-paid recruiters from each of the four services calling millions of students each month, some youths with no interest are contacted by as many as 15 recruiters, according to a 1996 study prepared by Lt. Col. James R. Thomas while at Rand Corp., a nonprofit think-tank studying the issue for the Army. The study suggested hiring telemarketing firms to make cold calls, weeding out seniors with no interest and creating a central database of the rest for recruiters to work from. Mr. Thomas estimated that doing so could boost the Defense Department's recruiting efficiency -- measured in terms of the number of calls it takes to yield a good lead -- by up to 25% and save as much as $500 million a year. Earlier this year, the Army began testing the use of private call centers in eight markets and says it found them effective in generating leads on a large scale in a short amount of time. Sgt. Cady's best hope for the day is a 6 p.m. appointment with Som Chanthamaly, 19, a community-college student he found while telephone prospecting last week. A few days earlier, Mr. Chanthamaly met with the Navy recruiters and took a practice version of the military's basic high-school skills test. He scored far too low to qualify for the Air Force. Two years ago he wouldn't be worth Sgt. Cady's time. Now, he is. First, Sgt. Cady talks up the Air Force's educational opportunities and high-tech jobs. Then, he moves on to more leisurely pursuits. "Som, tell me, what do you like to do?" Sgt. Cady asks. "I like golfing and fishing," Mr. Chanthamaly says. "Well, did you know every Air Force base in the U.S. has a golf course?" Sgt. Cady asks. "Have you ever tried to play golf on a Navy destroyer? It doesn't work so well." Sgt. Cady finishes up with Mr. Chanthamaly around 8 p.m., capping a 13-hour day. "The Navy recruiters are going to push him even harder than I did," Sgt. Cady says after he leaves. "But my gut says we'll get him." The next morning, Sgt. Cady's first meeting is a follow-up with Mr. Harper. Sgt. Cady has been courting him since he was a senior in high school. Tall and thin with a wisp of a mustache, Mr. Harper loves the movie "Top Gun." He was ready to join after their first conversation. His mother, however, wanted him to try a year of community college first. So Sgt. Cady waited. The day after Mr. Harper's college classes ended for the summer, the sergeant called and arranged another meeting. Mr. Harper signed up on the spot, agreeing to ship off to boot camp Sept. 9, giving Sgt. Cady credit toward his June quota. Keeping Mr. Harper on track is critical for Sgt. Cady, because if he drops out now, the loss would count against the month's quota. "You tried community college and it didn't work," Sgt. Cady implores him. "I know the Air Force is in your heart. You owe it to yourself to give it a try." For the moment, Mr. Harper agrees. But then he leaves to talk with his mother about her new $500 stay-in-college bonus program. If money were the only consideration, the military would win easily. To woo highly qualified recruits, the Defense Department this year started offering high-school graduates enlistment bonuses of as much as $12,000, up from $4,000 in 1994. As for salary, Congress is poised to approve a 4.8% pay raise for all military personnel, the largest in 20 years, adding $5.7 billion to the budget annually. Even without the pay raise, an airman with roughly four years of experience made about $2,017 a month in salary and benefits in 1997 -- more than nearly 80% of all male high-school graduates between the ages of 22 and 26, according to Rand. But experts say inducements such as signing bonuses have little impact in a growing economy. "We are reaching the point of diminishing returns," says Bruce Orvis, an analyst at Rand. "I don't think we can buy our way out of this." GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS Though Sgt. Cady remains hopeful that he will land Mr. Harper, he suffers a major setback that same Wednesday. Kristina, a young woman who signed up last fall and also was supposed to ship off to basic training in September, shows up in his office. She has a note from her doctor. She's pregnant. Sgt. Cady has spent more than a year coaxing the 17-year-old. When she had a falling out with her mother last winter, Sgt. Cady wrote her a letter praising her independence and good judgment so she could use it at an emancipation hearing (to be declared an adult before turning 18). Kristina, wearing a white button-down shirt and black shorts, plops down in a chair in front of Sgt. Cady's desk and stares down at her blue and white Nikes. "I wish I could give you a big hug because I consider you a friend," Sgt. Cady says after he reads the note. He asks how her father is handling the news. She doesn't look up: "He's been OK." Has she told her mother? She shakes her head no, still downcast. Sgt. Cady got credit for Kristina nine months ago, but now she counts against this month's quota. The loss means he needs three more recruits, not two, to meet his quota of four. "We're going backwards," he says. He strides out of his office, passing through the building's back door. It still bears the imprint of his size 13 shoe, the residue of a bad day several weeks earlier when he kicked it. Sgt. Cady takes a few deep breaths. He has one more meeting scheduled for Wednesday. When Neil Gauler shows up, Sgt. Cady smiles and booms, "Hello." Mr. Gauler, a recent high-school graduate who had contacted Mr. Cady, leans back in his chair and crosses his arms over his chest. He is wearing baggy jeans and a New York Yankees baseball cap. "What do you see yourself doing for a career?" Sgt. Cady asks. "I'd like to work in the hip-hop music industry," the teenager says. Any hobbies? "I like driving around and listening to hip-hop," Mr. Gauler replies. Sgt. Cady pitches Mr. Gauler on Air Force training in electronics and computers: That could help a career in the music industry. He pulls out a list of courses he took as part of his Air Force training. "You don't have to do homework in these classes?" Mr. Gauler asks. "If you assign me homework, I won't do it." Desperate, Sgt. Cady asks if there is anything else that grabs his interest. Mr. Gauler leans back in his chair. "The one thing I am interested in is making money," he says. "Making money easy." One week later, Sgt. Cady's score for the month remains stuck at one, and he is out of good prospects. Mr. Gauler has decided to attend community college. Mr. Chanthamaly took the qualification test, but didn't score high enough to join the Air Force, so he went for the Navy, which has slightly lower standards. He will ship off to boot camp in less than a month, since the Navy also is speeding up the enlistment process to address shipboard shortages. Of course, all the services could increase enlistment rates with such moves, but there is a serious drawback: The Navy's boot-camp attrition rate has jumped, since recruits without high-school degrees generally have a harder time assimilating and all new recruits have less time for second thoughts before arriving at boot camp. Mr. Harper, meanwhile, is still a worry. Since Sgt. Cady's last meeting with him, the African-American youth has called a black recruiter in the office to ask him about racial discrimination in the Air Force and whether he had any regrets. The recruiter told him that he hadn't experienced racial discrimination in the military and that he had no regrets. "He's having doubts," Sgt. Cady says. "His mother has been working on him." When Sgt. Cady arrives at the office the following Wednesday, he has only nine days left to make his quota. There's a message on his answering machine. It's Joy Erickson, a new prospect who had looked up Sgt. Cady in the telephone book the night before. She quickly becomes his best hope for the month. He calls her immediately. Ms. Erickson, 17, is from Saskatchewan, Canada. In May, her mother was hit by a truck and killed while delivering newspapers. After the accident, her friends and three siblings began treating her differently, she tells Sgt. Cady over the telephone. "I kind of felt like the replacement mom," she says later, her voice cracking. "I couldn't handle it. I needed a new start." So she moved to Seattle a couple of weeks ago to live with her older brother, who recently joined the Coast Guard. But Seattle hasn't helped. Ms. Erickson spends most of her day watching videos. The only night she ventured out for a walk, some men mistook her for a prostitute. Ms. Erickson doesn't have a car, so Sgt. Cady agrees to drive to her house about 40 minutes away and pick her up. "We need to get her before she finds a boyfriend," he says on the way to her apartment. On the drive back to his office, Sgt. Cady homes in on her loneliness. "You know, on an Air Force base you'll feel lonely for about 20 minutes," he tells her. "People treat you like a brother or a sister when they see you in that uniform. You're strangers, but you share an immediate bond." Sgt. Cady pushes her to sign up immediately, but she balks. She's leaving for her brother's wedding in California in two days and will make a decision when she comes back in several weeks. And she wants to check out the Army. Sgt. Cady backs off and drives her home. She won't help him meet his goal this month. By the last Monday of the month, Sgt. Cady has given up on making his quota. Tired of the phone, he decides to go out and look for people. He has doubled the amount of hours he spends driving around in his region hunting potential recruits. "I don't know where to turn," he says. In Seattle, other military recruiters with nowhere else to turn have begun cruising by bus stops and offering to drive students to school if they will listen to their pitch. Local principals complain that some recruiters also have shown up at students' homes uninvited. The practice got so out of hand that in August 1998, the middle-class Shoreline School District placed restrictions on all military recruiters. That followed a rash of complaints from parents, and an incident in which an Army recruiter in Shoreline was alleged to have fondled a high-school girl in his car. The recruiter was court martialed and acquitted. Then this spring, after a different Army recruiter was accused of giving a 16-year-old girl a ride home from school and accompanying her inside without her parents' permission, the school system banned Army recruiters completely. "The Army recruiters . . . didn't respect the rules set up to protect students," says Marjorie Ledell, a spokeswoman for the Shoreline School District. Sgt. Cady says he doesn't engage in such practices. On this Monday, he stops at a small luncheonette and a T-shirt shop. Then he heads to a pier where a group of young men are fishing for salmon. He tries to start up a conversation, but gets nowhere. "You're not going to knock us over the head and drag us off?" one of the fishermen asks. "No," Sgt. Cady replies. "We don't usually do that until the last day of the month." When the month's final day arrives, Sgt. Cady suffers one last blow: Devlin McGill, a community-college freshman who signed up in November 1998 for a September enlistment, tells the recruiter he's having grave doubts. He drops by the office for a meeting. Mr. McGill's parents, both college graduates, have flooded him with literature questioning the safety of the anthrax vaccine administered to almost all enlistees. They have pushed him to give community college one more try. "For someone who is going to waste four years of their life, the Air Force is a great adventure," Mr. McGill explains before visiting Sgt. Cady. "As much as I don't like the way my parents do things, I am starting to think I might be better off in college." Once inside the recruitment office, he tells Sgt. Cady he doesn't want to join the Air Force, citing concerns about the anthrax vaccine. "I can tell you that the secretary of defense had the anthrax shot," Sgt. Cady tells him. "The Air Force wouldn't require it if it weren't safe." The pitch goes nowhere. When Mr. McGill leaves, Sgt. Cady rubs his face. "I am dying," he says. That knocks Sgt. Cady down to zero recruits for the month. It is his worst month ever. When he calls his boss to tell him he has lost another recruit, Master Sgt. Patrick Brandell's response is curt. Sgt. Cady kept detailed notes on each of the dozens of conversations he had with Mr. McGill over the past six months. Sgt. Brandell tells him to fax them over immediately. "They want to review my notes so they can say it is my g--damn fault we are losing him," Sgt. Cady says. 'WHEN THE STRESS STARTS' A few hours later, Sgt. Brandell faxes Sgt. Cady his goal for the upcoming month: six recruits. "This is one thing you can do to really p--- off recruiters who are having a bad month," he says. "I can't find four kids who want to join the Air Force, and now I've got to find six. No one knows how to fix the problem so they just raise the goals. That is when the stress starts." Sgt. Cady's girlfriend calls. He tells her he doesn't have time. Before he can finish the sentence, she hangs up. He goes outside to get a breath of fresh air and then settles in for another round of cold calls. He also checks in with a prospect who had stood him up on three separate occasions. "I don't normally drive over to someone's house, but I am willing to drive over there to tell you about the Air Force," he tells the young man. Then Sgt. Cady again calls Mr. Harper, the young man considering his mother's $500 anti-enlistment bonus. Now Mr. Harper is worried that he won't be able to handle the technical challenges of the Air Force. Sgt. Cady reminds him of the commitment he made to the military. "I am confident you can do it," he tells him. "You're a very bright young man." Shortly after 7 p.m., Sgt. Cady heads home to apologize to his girlfriend. After working six days a week, 12 hours a day for the entire month, he has netted zero recruits. Tomorrow is the first day of a new month, and he has no leads. On Sept. 8, Mr. Harper ships off to San Antonio for Air Force boot camp. The following day, Sgt. Cady begins a new job. Fed up, he had asked for a transfer. Now, he's training recruiters in Michigan. "I feel like a new man," he says. "It's nice not having that quota hanging over your head every day. But I can't forget what it feels like, because I am going to be training guys under the same pressure. It is awful easy to forget how hard it is and to have unrealistic and unfair expectations." The Questions; 1- What is contributing to the stress that Sgt Cady feels? 2- Can he do anything about this stress? 3- What organizational factors are preventing him from accomplishing his goals and why are they existent anyway?

• Answer:

  Hello shosho99-ga, That was an interesting article -- I love the Wall Street Journal! Here are your answers: 1- What is contributing to the stress that Sgt Cady feels? Sgt Cady has three primary sources of stress: 1) He feels like he is alone in his problems. He is having difficulty signing up new recruits, and he has nobody to turn to about that difficulty. 2) He is feeling disrespected by his task. He mentions the run-down office. The article mentions how schools and members of society can view recruiters as dangerous or overzealous people. 3) His recruiting task is difficult. At that time, it was hard to sign up young people for the military. Many of those reasons (a strong economy, etc.) were outside of his control. Whenver somebody works on a hard task and doesn't make progress, they feel stressed. 2- Can he do anything about this stress? Yes, there are a number of things he can do to deal with his stress. First, he can seek peers or council. He needs to find people who can listen to him talk about his difficulties and also tell him about their own stress. Sgt Cady needs to find ways to create change and variation in his routine. Instead of having recruits coming down to the dingy office, he could meet them at a new, more exciting locations. Of course Sgt Cady could use one of many standard stress management techniques. A long list of them (including physical excercise) is here: http://www.imt.net/~randolfi/StressLinks.html - a long list of resources on stress http://www.ivf.com/stress.html - i like this discussion of stress Finally, he actually took a great step to relieving stress when he took a new position training recruiters. He did viewed the change as an advancement, not a setback, which is excellent. 3- What organizational factors are preventing him from accomplishing his goals and why are they existent anyway? Sgt Cady does not have any peers to turn to. Instead he is either rushing to please his superiors or fighting to out-recruit other recruiters. Also, it seems like his superiors do not provide enough support. Rather than ask for his conversation notes, they might ask him what he needs from them to meet the next month's quota. Another organizational factor is the quota system. The quota only seems to be driven by the military's demand for recruits, and is not flexible to other factors, such as the general willingness for young people to volunteer. Said another way, the system seems too results-driven. They might try rewarding other behavior (for both Sgt Cady and his superiors) such as survey remarks by recruits that they interact with. I hope that helps you! dogbite-ga